And only there have I come anywhere near what this film is about. Ms. Dunnock plays an elderly woman, a wheelchair case, who is pushed down a staircase—in her chair—by Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark).
Widmark was already thirty-three, from Sunrise, Minnesota. He had taught drama at Lake Forest College, and he acted in radio in the early 1940s. But he had not made a film before Kiss of Death. Let me add one other thing, based on personal encounter, albeit many years later. Richard Widmark (who died in March 2008) is among the gentlest, most amiable, decent, and modest men I have ever met. It would be hard to detect a strain of cruelty or malice in him. I would trust him under the worst circumstances of storm, plague, and natural disaster, with old ladies and young puppies alike.
Yet Tommy Udo—remembered by people who cannot recall anything else about Kiss of Death—is one of the most frightening people ever revealed on the American screen. It is not just that he is a thug, a villain. He is plainly sadistic—whatever emotional life he has is fueled and gratified by inflicting pain and suffering on others. Nor is this a grim, silent process. No, the pleasure he has is greeted with glee, with immense giggling fits of supremacy, with a simply evil reversal of all human values.
Widmark played Udo in a fedora, a dark suit, a black shirt, and a light tie (and when he dies in the gutter, we see white socks—a dandy). It is my memory (I only saw the trailer of the film in 1947, before a mother’s hurried hands shut out the view—the giggle was another matter) that he resembled the Gestapo look. I don’t know how widely this was appreciated at the time, or even how calculated it was by the filmmakers, but Udo was the imprint of the great evil.
He was nominated for the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. He stole the picture. And for several years thereafter he had to be nasty onscreen. He became, later, a hero—though he could do anger and hatred still, at the drop of a Stetson. But he changed pictures, and our safe view of their evil characters.
Klute (1971)
The first thing to ask about this ravishing film is, why is it called Klute? Sure, John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is the character we meet first, the one who seems to drive the action when he is hired out of being a small-town cop to investigate the disappearance in Manhattan of a respectable citizen from that small town in Pennsylvania. But Klute is also numb, underdeveloped, not just a country boy but a recessive soul: Klute is a watcher, and maybe a voyeur—by which I mean someone who gets his deepest psychic gratification just from watching. And Klute’s watching is what discloses Bree—Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda), a fairly successful call girl. Put it this way. Bree never made it as an actress, but when she’s acting out sexual rapture for guys in from Pennsylvania and elsewhere she’s a trick.
In time, Klute and Bree will find the answer to the initial mystery. They will identify the sex killer who murdered that respectable fellow. Yet not an atom of the dread that inspires the film will be abated. There is a stunning last scene, as Bree quits her apartment. She is going off with Klute, it seems. She takes a last call as the call girl and says she’s going away. Will they marry? Will they endure? Or is Bree’s acting instinct so strong that she needs the telephone like a drug—the film is full of phones, recorders, and voice-overs, the sinister nature of which blends exquisitely with Michael Small’s minimal but indelible score.
Andy and Dave Lewis wrote it and Alan J. Pakula directed, and I think it’s the best film he ever made because the paranoia at which he excelled is more intimate and concentrated than in any other film. The scenes where Bree hears someone or something on the roof of her building are so well done that repeated viewing does not take away their menace.
But this is truly a film about Bree and about the several ways in which being a psvchiatric patient (talking about oneself), being a hooker (acting out), and being an actress (acting in) are overlapping or in a rhyme scheme. And the triumph of the film is the intelligence and the appetite with which Jane Fonda falls upon it. That she won the Oscar goes without saying, but this is one of the best movie studies of performance. The delicacy with which Fonda balances the real story of Bree and the larger implications is exemplary. No wonder Sutherland seems so numb watching her—she was a sight to behold.
Is it more than that? Well, yes, I think so. Pakula was not a secure or happy man. He had a lot of analysis himself. And this is, if you like, a tribute to a kind of urban anxiety that is uniquely American. And it says a lot, for that large atmosphere—the dark that surrounds Bree and Klute—is one in which every supporting role contributes. So Roy Scheider was never better than as a pimp, and there is excellent work from Charles Cioffi, Rita Gam, and Dorothy Tristan. Here is one of the most disconcerting works of the early 1970s.
Knave of Hearts (1954)
It is usually known as Monsieur Ripois in France, as Lovers, Happy Lovers or Lover Boy in America, and as Knave of Hearts in Britain, where it was largely shot. As you might guess, it is very hard to see it anywhere. Yet warm memory says this is a remarkable film, one of the most bittersweet on the compelling subject of womanizing. It comes from a novel, M. Ripois and His Nemesis, by Louis Hémon. Apparently, Raymond Queneau was the first person who saw a film in the book. He encouraged director René Clément to hire Jean Aurenche to write a screenplay. But Clément rejected that and assigned it to Englishman Hugh Mills.
It’s the story of Andre Ripois (he’s named Amede in the book), an attractive Frenchman who is living in London. He is married. But a divorce is under way and he is engaged in an affair with the wife’s friend. Ripois is a kind of a virus of infidelity, except that he seems to love all women—as the film goes forward, we get flashbacks on previous affairs. The film was produced by Paul Graetz, who had produced Le Diable au Corps. For the English viewer, there were two heady wonders in the film: the impact of a great French actor (Gérard Philipe) on English women; and the way in which Clément saw or noticed a London that had seldom been featured in British films.
The film was photographed by Oswald Morris, and it has that summery grayness that became a keynote of his work. It was filmed in summer, and Clément and Morris together get that sultry, blossomy feeling of the city. It’s often the case that visitors see the heart of a city better than natives, and Knave of Hearts had a big effect on how the British saw their great city. There’s a scene where Ripois picks up Joan Greenwood on a bus—and all shot on a moving bus—that has a stinging freshness not seen in British film before.
But more than that, Graetz and Clément chose a range of English actresses not quite in the first rank, or the most obvious casting, but full of life—Valerie Hobson as the wife, the very beautiful Natasha Parry (Mrs. Peter Brook) as the mistress, Joan Greenwood, Margaret Johnston, Diana Decker. As for Philipe, he handles the English language very well and shows how easily he might have become an international star. But it’s probably true that he misses the moral severity in Hémon’s novel.
Ripois ends up in a wheelchair, dependent on women to push him around. But the character exists in outline of a handsome man who simply collects women for his own pleasure. Some observers at the time noted that Clément was possibly trying to remake Kind Hearts and Coronets. Maybe, but I wonder about another connection—with Tom Ripley, the amoral figure beginning to appear in the writings of Patricia Highsmith. Only five years ahead, a film appeared, Purple Noon—the first great attempt at Ripley onscreen. Alain Delon played Tom—and René Clément directed.
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) is an adverting executive. He and his wife, Joanna (Meryl Streep), have one son, Billy (Justin Henry), who is seven. Joanna decides to walk out, because she has no fulfilling life of her own. So Ted tries to take care of Billy, a child he hardly knows. But in the year that follows they make a bond and are getting on fine. Then Joanna comes back, feeling restored. She wants her son returned to her. Whereupon Ted loses his job because he’s not concentrating. Lawyers and a judge come into play, and Joanna is awarded custody. But human nature and the legitimized cruelty of divorce are
yet to be “righted” by this smug Hollywood story: Joanna relents and lets Billy stay with his father.
When the story is put like that, you may marvel that Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer has the reputation for being a sophisticated study of modern divorce (as opposed to a Griffith film, where Dustin Hoffman plays Lillian Gish). Again, that lets us know how early 1979 was in the story of American divorce, which was seemingly the great raw bone of contentiousness that was being served up as popular entertainment. Some hope! Kramer vs. Kramer is loaded, prejudicial, softhearted, terribly upper-middle-class and Manhattan, and almost intolerably enlightened. In other words, don’t have any doubts about it: Great family and personal damage is being done in the divorce courts every day. Above all, matters of relationship are being converted wholesale into arguments about money, the only measuring stick that is available to the courts.
Kramer vs. Kramer came from a best-selling novel by Avery Corman, and it departs from the statistics of divorce in all these respects: It has a divorce in which no one has been unfaithful; it serves as an unspoken rebuke to women’s liberation; it never gets into money talk; it has a magical ending. And all of these mind-boggling departures function within what is hopefully regarded as a broadly accurate social statement, one that tries to take account of the child’s point of view. Benton wrote it himself; Néstor Almendros photographed it. Paul Sylbert did the art direction. Jerry Greenberg edited. Ruth Morley did the costumes. And the music is lifted from Purcell and Vivaldi. So it looks like The World of Interiors and sounds like a PBS minidrama. The prettiness and the tidiness are oppressive and entirely at odds with the natural violence that is unleashed in divorce.
Hoffman is the kind of father whose acting is chronically self-centered. Streep is playing a character whose life is not properly addressed. Justin Henry is there to be adorable, and there are wise, “sensitive” supporting performances from Jane Alexander, Howard Duff, George Coe, JoBeth Williams, Bill Moor, and Howard Chamberlain. It won Oscars for Best Picture, for Benton, for Hoffman, for Streep, and for screenplay, and I suppose its inane studied gentility may have inspired many more people into divorce. So remember this: Sooner or later in divorce cases, everyone behaves as badly as Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger—and sometimes all the time.
L.A. Confidential (1997)
The first delight in Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy is the sheer density of plot. It is a while before we begin to sense where this story is going, but in that while we meet three very different cops: Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), dapper, expert, mildly corrupt, and the liaison with a TV cop show; Bud White (Russell Crowe), brutish, violent, corrupt; and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), handsome, the son of a cop, incorruptible, but a pain in the neck. And by necessity, all of them have their special private relationship with Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), captain of detectives, master of spin and presentation, the spirit of the city.
It’s notable, and refreshing, that the script—by Hanson and Brian Helgeland—has opted for a quiet control, especially when compared with the crammed and hectic feel of Ellroy’s writing. A lot of the novel has been put aside, yet the result is not just a rich sense of period, but a series of stories and characters all done justice. The one thing lacking is a larger sense of what the story might be about, of what it’s saying about the nature of the policeman. Its ending is gentler than we have been led to expect, yet along the way there are large questions about what makes a good cop that don’t necessarily fit with a public sense of duty.
So the film settles for texture and delivers it from the start. Dante Spinotti’s camerawork is a tribute to noir without any kind of pastiche. Jeannine Oppewall’s production design is faultless and a delight for the connoisseur of the shady city. Ruth Myers’s costumes speak volumes in a world where young women can make a strange career if they look enough like a movie star. More might have been made of that, but it’s characteristic that Helgeland prefers to settle for Kim Basinger being her real self rather than a girl lost in the simile of Veronica Lake. Hanson is not one for the mythology. Instead, he delivers a stuning story—never more so than in the final meeting of Vincennes and Dudley.
Spacey is pretty self-effacing as Vincennes. Crowe emerged as a new kind of lead actor. And Guy Pearce just about gets away with Mr. Priss. James Cromwell is the star of the picture, I think: His ambiguities are the bloodstream of the LAPD. He is the history and the startling present. Danny DeVito may overdo it a bit as the magazine publisher. But there are superb performances from David Strathairn, Ron Rifkin as a cowardly DA, Paul Guilfoyle (as Mickey Cohen), Graham Beckel and Darrell Sandeen as two soiled detectives, Amber Smith, Simon Baker, and actors playing Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato. Basinger was the one Oscar winner—a kindness in a film crowded with better performances. (It won for adapted screenplay, too.) It’s only on repeated viewings that L.A. Confidential seems more cautious than shocking. In the last analysis, Ellroy’s horror has been not so much missed as shelved. Citizens of L.A. can sleep in confidence, more or less—which was never quite Ellroy’s plan.
The Lady Eve (1941)
Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) has been two years up the Amazon—and it shows. He is an ophiologist, and surely those waters are rich with his chosen passion. Still, after two years of the serpent, it is about time he met Eve. Did I say that he is the heir to the Pike’s Pale Ale fortune, the ale that won for Yale? And so he leaves by dugout and makes rendezvous with the SS Southern Queen, a luxury liner. Watching him come aboard is a most attractive father and daughter couple, “Colonel” Harrington (Charles Coburn) and Jean of that ilk (Barbara Stanwyck). They are cardsharps, and they smell a rich idiot in Charles. In a gorgeous scene in the shipboard dining room where Jean uses her face mirror to scan the crowd of women eyeing Charles, she flattens him with a fifteen-yard trip, but escapes any call and limps away to her cabin with the thoroughly flustered Charles, there to have him stroke her ankle and look into the eyes she has placed so close to his. Poor beer heir, he is only used to handling snakes. And this is one of the sexiest scenes in American film.
This is The Lady Eve, inspired by a shaggy dog story, “Two Bad Hats” by Monckton Hoffe, and advised upon by Albert Lewin (an uncredited associate producer) but spun as gold by Preston Sturges alone. Charles and Jean fall instantly in love, despite or because of being so unsuited? Surely love takes oxygen to its fire in unsuitability? Still, the colonel does take Charles to pieces at cards, and Muggsy (William Demarest), the Pikes’ Luca Brasi, smells bad fish. So in time “Hopsy” (the motion of the beer) learns the truth, and turns solemn and furious over the dastardly scheme. It is all over?
It is just starting. Jean elects to educate her expert. She will masquerade as an English aristocrat, the Lady Eve, and go to Bridgefield, Connecticut, where the Pikes live. She is aided in this by a friend, “Pearlie,” or Sir Alfred McGlennan-Keith (Eric Blore). Charles’s father proves to be Eugene Pallette, a very reassuring discovery—for Charles might yet be a nasty, supercilious ophiologist (instead of a guy stirred by Stanwyck’s ankle and moist gaze), but now we see he has sterling things in him. Lady Eve is a wow, though Muggsy suspects it’s “positively the same dame!” A marriage ensues and it’s only then that Eve has to admit her checkered past and her many lovers, teaching Hopsy his ABCs.
The Lady Eve is screwball, yet it is a fine romance, too, one in which the dense Charles has to learn to look at Jean/Eve and decide what it is he sees. Very funny, strangely erotic, utterly endearing, this may be the Sturges film that outlasts all others. Fonda is like Tom Joad as if he were Professor Joad’s son. Stanwyck was in her harvest moon period. Charles Coburn is exquisite, and the cast also includes Melville Cooper, Martha O’Driscoll, Janet Beecher, Robert Greig, Dora Clement, Luis Alberni, Frank Moran, and others in the Sturges gang.
The Lady from Shanghai (1948)
Consider the possibility that, in order to avert and forestall real madness, Orson Welles “went mad.” I am offering a man so brilliant, so self-centered, an
d so actorly that, just as he sees the real dread thing looming up, he determines to act the idiot. So long as he is acting, doesn’t he have everything under control? No, I cannot prove this, not without asking you to consider The Lady from Shanghai.
Orson Welles was thirty-two, in the breakup stage of a second marriage, about to be the lost father to a second child. He had slipped in a few years from being wonder boy to washed up in the eyes of American show business. There may have been moments when he realized how close he had come in the hectic years to burning himself out. He was in Boston, with an enormous production of Around the World in Eighty Days that was melting money and proving very little except his empty audacity. And this is the story as he told it himself. He telephoned Harry Cohn (at Columbia) for urgent monies to save the show. And he told Cohn that he would do a picture for him. Just send $50,000. “What story?” asks Cohn. And Orson is on the phone in a hotel lobby from where he can see the bookstand (oh, happy days, when hotels had bookstores), and he reads out the first title that catches his eye.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 72
